Every moment you spend online, you’re being tracked. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and hundreds of other websites are cataloging every search term, mouse click, and website visit. It can be hard for the average person to wrap their head around. A lot of it’s legal, but some of it isn’t and if you don’t know what you’re looking for it can be hard to parse the scale and illegality of the data companies are collecting on you.
WebXray, a new tool made by a former Google Engineer, wants to make it easier.
WebXray is a search engine that anyone can use to see how, specifically, websites are tracking you. A normal user can enter a text string, like “cancer” or “pregnancy,” then see which websites are tracking that specific search, using which cookies, and what those cookies are for.
A woman might search around for information about pregnancy before she’s taken a test or told her loved ones and then get served advertisements for baby strollers and formula. WebXray can tell you which websites gave that information to Google AdSense. People who search for porn on an open browser may be shocked to learn their histories are being cataloged and sorted by advertisers. Again, WebXray can tell you which sites are doing it.
The search engine is the brainchild of Tim Libert, a former Google engineer with big concerns about privacy on the web. He told WIRED he had the idea for WebXray when he was a grad student researching cookies and ad tech in the 2010s. He joined Google because he wanted to make the web a more private place for everyone and figured he could do it easier from the inside. It didn’t work out.
“I think I’ve lost my ability to be shocked, I’ve seen it all,” he told Gizmodo in an email. “Perhaps the thing that is hardest to explain is really how big this is, the volume of data, the amount of tracking, the details of billions of people’s lives running through a labyrinth of distant servers. It’s all very sci-fi, and not in a good way!”
Libert left Google after two years and went back to work on WebXray. New laws in Europe and the U.S. have made a lot of the kind of data tracking these websites are doing illegal. The problem is that figuring out how all this stuff works is incredibly hard.
Libert’s goal, in part, was to make it easier to figure out which companies are tracking what so prosecutors and companies can be better informed.
“I think the big thing is to understand that there are already laws in place that protect privacy online, but the regulatory authorities have been outgunned—both in the USA and in Europe,” he told Gizmodo. “People should be asking their politicians what the hold up is, and to increase budgets. A normal state attorney general office simply doesn’t have the resources they need to enforce the law—and while politicians are happy to give money to ‘law enforcement’ aimed at shoplifting, corporate crime is ignored.”
For WebXray, lawsuits are part of the business plan. Libert told WIRED that he wants to be the “Henry Ford of tech lawsuits—turn this into a factory assembly line.” Anyone can use the tool to see how their search terms are being used, but it’s possible to go deeper. Everybody gets 25 free daily searches and access to a simple rundown of every cookie used on the site.
People who pay for WebXray get access to a more forensic and deep accounting of the privacy violations we all live with. It’s perfect for a legal firm that’s looking to build a case against a company that’s violating people’s privacy or a tech company that’s trying to track down all the cookies it’s not aware are violating the law.
The site’s motto is “privacy is inevitable.”
“I think business practices that are roundly rejected by the vast majority of internet users can’t continue forever,” Libert told Gizmodo. “We have more and more laws, and more and more lawsuits, some are successful, some are not. But in aggregate, we’re moving in the right direction. The reason I started the company is I think we can make it go faster.”
In 2023, Google claimed it would kill third-party cookies entirely, in part because it needed to comply with more stringent privacy laws. On Monday, Google backed out of the plan.
“The big issue that the press has missed is nobody sets more third-party cookies than Google, part of the reason we made the search engine is so people can see this for themselves,” Libert told Gizmodo in an email. “If you go to the top cookies page you’ll see Google is far above anybody else: https://webxray.ai/top_cookies.”
In an email sent to Gizmodo, Google pushed back on Libert’s assertion.
“Respecting user privacy is our top priority and to claim otherwise is wrong,” a Google spokesperson said. “We design and build our products with strong security and privacy protections, including easy-to-use controls for managing and deleting data. When it comes to advertising, Google was the first company to build a tool that lets people see and adjust their ads settings and even opt out of personalized ads entirely.”
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